The Left-Right Divide Isn’t the One That Matters
Locked in a close race for first place in both Iowa and New Hampshire with only weeks to go before Democratic presidential-primary voting begins, Pete Buttigieg, along with his advisers, is talking about bringing people together. In a recent New Yorker profile, Benjamin Wallace-Wells quoted Buttigieg as welcoming “future former Republicans” into “our movement” and pledging to “unify the American people” once Donald Trump is gone. One Buttigieg strategist explained that the South Bend, Indiana, mayor wants to tap into America’s “yearning for reconciliation.” Another adviser, Lis Smith, recently contrasted her boss, whom she credited with the ability to “heal our divides,” with Elizabeth Warren, who is supposedly contributing to the “divisiveness that is tearing this country apart.”
Buttigieg’s depiction of himself as a more unifying figure than his chief rivals has a superficial plausibility. He’s more ideologically centrist than Warren and Bernie Sanders. He’s from a red state. He’s unfailingly polite. He hasn’t been in politics long enough to make many enemies. And he’s a white man, which may—in and of itself—make him less threatening to those Trump supporters to see another female presidential nominee as evidence of the anti-male bias purportedly warping American life.
